Tag: glasses

Here’s everything that grabbed our attention in the past week from dwile-flonking to brewery takeovers.

For the BBC David Gilyeat returns to a favourite silly season topic: traditional pub games. There’s nothing especially new here but it’s an entertaining round-up that draws on the expertise of, among others, Arthur Taylor, whose book on the subject is definitive:

Arthur Taylor, author of Played at the Pub, suggests Aunt Sally – which is played in Oxfordshire and parts of Buckinghamshire – has rather grisly origins.

‘It can be traced back to a barbarous business called “throwing at cocks”, when you threw sticks at a cock tethered to a post that if you killed you took home,’ he says.

‘What was barbarous turned into something that wasn’t, and the cock became a coconut shy… and eventually it became the game we know.’

Chinese steel producers like Jinfu have begun establishing ‘reseller’ companies that sell their goods under different names. One such company, Crusader Kegs & Casks LTD, works out of Rushden, England, and was on site at CBC 2017. At quick glance, one would have no idea they weren’t selling British kegs. The capital U in the name is a St. George’s flag kite shield, and the reverse side of their business cards have a sword-wielding, armor-clad Templar, almost like they’re trying really, really hard to ensure they look as ‘British’ as possible.

There are plenty of other disconcerting details in the story which is a great example of the kind of insight generated by asking awkward questions.

Fritz Tauscher at Krone-Brauerei in Tettnang, Germany, uses a slightly different process. He adds 60 to 70 percent of his hops as he lauters wort into the brewing kettle…. He explained that initially he added all his first wort hops (what he calls ‘ground hopping’) in one dose. ‘I thought the bitterness was not so good,’ he said. He opened his right hand, put it to his chin and slid it down his throat to his clavicle, tracking the path a beer would take. ‘It was, I’m not sure how you say it in English, adstringierend.’ No translation was necessary.

GBBF controversy: in an open letter Manchester’s Marble Brewing has alleged that the local CAMRA branch effectively prevented their beers appearing at the Great British Beer Festival, suggesting that a dispute over an incident of sexist behaviour might be the cause. CAMRA head office has confirmed it is investigating the issues raised. (But don’t read too much into that statement.)

And finally @nickiquote has found the moment where Doctor Who and the real ale craze intersected:

If someone comes into your pub twice you’re missing a trick if you don’t say hello.

We were hanging out with Bailey’s parents recently when his mum told us this story about their pub-going in the 1970s:

The second time we went into The Cobblestones the landlady came over and said, ‘Right, if you’re going to be coming in regularly, I ought to know your names.’ Then a few months later she said, ‘I’ve got something for you,’ and gave Dad a pint glass with a euchre hand on it, and Grandpa a glass with cherries on, because he liked the fruit machines. We drank in there for years.

This seems like such a simple, effective, emotionally manipulative approach. If you see the same face twice, make a formal introduction, and then use those names at every opportunity. Then after, say, three months of regular custom ask if they’d like a loyalty card, or a glass behind the bar, or make some other small gesture — ‘That one’s on the house.’

In practice, there are probably all sorts of reasons this doesn’t happen so often these days, not least the fact that it feels ever rarer to actually find the licensee behind the bar. We often ask (because we want permission to take photos or need to ask some questions for one Thing or another) ‘Is this your place, then?’ and we can’t think of many occasions when the answer has been anything other than, ‘No, I’m just the manager.’

In big chains, though, Creating Regulars could be built into staff objectives and the performance management programme… Aaaaaaaaand we’ve depressed ourselves.

Even in the most wide-ranging, smaller-serving-focused craft beer bars in the country, we remain interested in filling a pint-shaped hole, and if it remains an unchangeable line in our programming, our industry will remain defined by the beers that fit this space, and not by what we could, or perhaps should, be brewing.

SOURCE: Belgian Smaak.

2015 Beer Writer of the Year Breandán Kearney considers the state and history of the brewery at Orval in a luxuriously long post at Belgian Smaak, which also has lots of juicy detail for home brewers and the generally inquisitive:

The malt bill is an evolving one, barley varieties such as ‘Aleksi’ and ‘Prisma’ used previously having been replaced for example with the ‘Sebastian’ variety. ‘It is difficult to speak about varieties of barley malt because a lot of them disappear for new ones,’ says Anne-Françoise [Pypaert]. ‘Brewers don’t have much control on that because farmers value varieties with a good yield. What I can say is that we use two pale malt varieties, one caramel malt and a little bit of black barley.’

‘I’m interested in the history of the branded beer glass in pubs. Any idea when it came about, who started it and why?’ Mark Dredge

Oof. This turned out to be too big a question for us. Mark originally asked back in December and we’ve been trying, on and off, with some effort, to find a definitive answer since then.

We didn’t get one.

In the hope that someone out there knows, or might fancy doing some research themselves, here’s what we have learned.

1. Britain

In his monograph Pub Beer Mugs and Glasses (2007) Hugh Rock includes photographs of a vast range of antique British beer drinking vessels. There are several late Victorian earthenware mugs bearing the names of pubs (to help prevent theft, presumably); and a couple of glasses from around 1890 etched with what appear to be beer or brewery names. But the earliest examples of what we would recognise as mass-produced branded glassware, with colour logos, date from as late as the 1960s.

A pasglas is a tall beer glass from the 17th century used for drinking games. The glass gets its name from the passen (stripes) marked around the beer glass with the intention that, during a drinking game, each competitor would try to drink down to the next line… The pasglas is common in paintings of the 17th century in which it can symbolise the temptations of life. The quality of the glass itself was poor and often contain air bubbles; this, and the low appreciation of the glasses, means that few have been preserved.

There are indeed lots of pictures of these peculiar glasses, such as ‘An Allegory of Taste’ by Petrus Staverenus, that was auctioned at Christie’s in 2012 (and from where we nicked the picture):

It looks a bit like a modern-day brewing sample jar, a vase, or maybe a distant relative of a German wheat beer glass.

There’s a lot more information on the website of ALMA, a Dutch project which aims to connect physical objects from history with paintings that depict them. Its essay says: ‘The eight-sided green pass glass is found regularly in archaeological excavations, not only in the Netherlands but also in Germany, Denmark, Sweden and even in the United States.’ It also includes the rules of the drinking game gleaned from a poem inscribed on a glass in Vienna:

The verse makes it clear that the pass glass was used by a group of drinking companions who passed the glass round and everyone must take a swallow from it. The drinker was challenged to go from measure to measure in one gulp and if he missed, then he had to go on to the next measure.

Sounds like fun, and all very sociable. Someone making these today would clean up at Christmas, wouldn’t they?

The main image up top is a detail from ‘Vrolijk Gezelschap’ by Jan Miense Molenaer, c.1660 – 1668, from the ALMA website.